You’re invited to enjoy music all day long on the Rooted in the Valley Stage with Signature Sounds. Whether you’re enjoying the free family festival, eating lunch or sampling craft beers, you’re near the Rooted in the Valley Stage. (11am-4pm)

When future music historians look back at the strong currents circulating between the Americas in the 21st century, they will find Los Lobos, Calexico, and a charismatic Missourian singing tight harmony with a Southern belle rattling the jawbone of a donkey. David Wax and Suz Slezak front the David Wax Museum, and together with their band they fuse traditional Mexican folk with indie rock and American roots to create a Mexo-Americana aesthetic. Combining Latin rhythms, infectious melodies, and call-and-response hollering, DWM was hailed by TIME for its “virtuosic musical skill and virtuous harmonies” and has built a reputation among concertgoers all over the U.S, Canada, Europe and China for “kicking up a cloud of excitement with their high-energy border-crossing sensibility” (The New Yorker).

The Brooklyn-based singer and her band make grooving modern vintage music that nods to the traditions of saloon jazz, country swing, early rockabilly, and New Orleans second line, yet somehow maintains a unique and personal sound. Miss Tess & The Talkbacks have just released The Love I Have For You. The 7-song album features six covers and one new original and pays homage to some of Tess’s favorite singers and songwriters including Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt, Neil Young, Ted Hawkins, Randy Newman, and Hank Williams. Miss Tess explains how the band chose the 6 songs to cover: “Each artist we covered has held a special place in the history of our lives, as well as in the history of American music. These folks are all musical giants who dedicated their lives to music, and for that I hold them in the highest esteem.”

"When I conceived of the band in Boston back in 2006 or so, we had a horn player and we were a little more jazz influenced," says Miss Tess. “In the last couple of years the sound has evolved, something that naturally happens when you spend so much time on the road with a band. We’ve become slightly edgier and there is some more country and early rock n’ roll coming through. We now have two electric guitars. I'd been thinking about a change for a while and we finally settled on a name. With a name like the Talkbacks, it is what it is."

That's a good thing because it's not easy to define Miss Tess and the Talkbacks. You’ll have to come hear them and come up with your own definition at the Asparagus Festival.

After thousands of concerts across tens-of-thousands of miles, Ruth Ungar & Mike Merenda have emerged as one of acoustic America’s most revered musical duos. As story-tellers, as singers, as poets and as parents (they tour with their two small children), Mike + Ruthy are heralds of an American cultural awakening that values honesty and togetherness, prefers grit to glitz, and revels in the old-fashioned telling of a story. Described as “rich, vintage Americana” by Time Out NY, Mike + Ruthy’s 2012 Woody Guthrie collaboration “My New York City” is being hailed as one of the most gorgeous pieces ever to have come out of the archive.

Mike + Ruthy can hold an intimate audience in the palm of their hands, and then when it's festival season it's time to crank it up a notch and expand the band. An Americana mix of bass, drums and pedal steel add swirl and stomp, making their set even more powerful, and fun for the big stage.

A beautiful, live, duo record and a fresh, full-band, studio album are currently in the works for release in 2014 and 2015 respectively. They also have some solo work developing as Ruthyuke and Ruthless Mike. Stay tuned.